4 ms·

I'm against the agism in the article but the rest of it is sound. Right now we means test shareholders on the basis of whether they have capital to invest in a

I'm against the agism in the article but the rest of it is sound. Right now we means test shareholders on the basis of whether they have capital to invest in a company, which is discriminatory in a society like ours where wealth inequality is the highest it's been in the history of the world. If half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished quality of life that takes everything they got just to survive, then wealth is an inherited trait just like cultural identity. I think it's time to question the rationality of people who are against UBI. Their failures in big picture thinking and long term planning, whether in basic economic principles like opportunity cost or tragedy of the commons, or in more existential philosophical matters like whether it's ok to subsist on the toil of others, shouldn't take precedence over our self-governance/determination. What I'm saying is that we're approaching a day when one person owns the entire discretionary spending of each country, and has effectively corrupted government to the point where propaganda informs our beliefs more than ethics. Are we there yet? Maybe not quite. 10 or 20 years away? Perhaps - look who's president. UBI threatens the status quo (specifically crony and vulture capitalism) more than almost any concept I can think of. So for that reason alone, I'm strongly for it.

thatswrong0 7y ago
> I think it's time to question the rationality of people who are against UBI This sounds like a thinly veiled ad hominem against skeptics.
- zackmorris 7y ago
  Ya thanks for pointing that out. I probably should have phrased it "I think it's time to question the rationale of arguments against UBI" because personally I think most of them are straw men masking cognitive dissonant or undignified positions. In other words - at their root are things like classism/racism, fear of socialistic solutions to fundamental problems with capitalism, or flat out greed and the "I've got mine" mentality that's so prevalent in the US. That fear/uncertainty is a distraction from what we are capable of today with automation. It's a 20th century zero sum worldview where giving to someone requires taking from someone else. I don't subscribe to that, because we could largely automate basic sustenance production (food, water, energy, shelter, transportation, etc), charge very little for it, require substantially less human labor, and turn any profits from that into a stipend that we all get for being US citizens. I think that's more in line with a 21st century or Star Trek future.
  - akvadrako 7y ago
    I would weaken the claim a little – UBI is at least interesting enough that we should be doing trials. What the skeptics need to show is that trials are not worth it.
folkhack 7y ago
> I think it's time to question the rationality of people who are against UBI. It's people who are invested into the system. Anecdotal: the arguments I get into on this one are with people who don't want to argue any of the human side of the policy. It's not even a thought to them - and they won't even meet you on that battlefield. Also, people who fight UBI are always people who have some sort of investments, are rent collectors, etc. The first thing they will ALWAYS point to is that there's no proof it will help the economy/markets. They also like to point out how it's not fair for someone to take my money through taxes because "I earned" being a high earner (aside: I did get to being a high earner because of hard work, but also because an incredible network of external support via school + family + _community_ + _country_). The fear of UBI is the fear of admitting that you had help. It's admitting the status-quo needs challenged. Like - by ALL MEANS tax the hell out of me if it means that we lessen human suffering and raise the bar for my fellow citizens. Selfishly, I think I'll be better off that way. The point that someone gets the majority of the hotels in Monopoly the game is no longer fun, and it's a race to the bottom... but at this point I think they're just playing a different game than we are.
ap3 7y ago
>If half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished quality of life that takes everything they got just to survive, then wealth is an inherited trait just like cultural identity. I question whether half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished way of life. Furthermore wealth is inherited, and we have an inheritance tax for it. Still don’t get how UBI creates wealth
- zackmorris 7y ago
  It's not a question. We passed the point where children have less than a 50% chance of being wealthier than their parents sometime around 1980: https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s-does-poorly-on-yet-another-metric-of-economic-mobility https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s... Countless studies show it's basically impossible to live on minimum wage jobs anywhere in the US now. I'm more than 50% confident that a quick internet search will show them so I won't bother listing them here. The inheritance tax is low and in constant danger of being eliminated by the Republican party. All income should be taxed the same way (meaning we should eliminate capital gains tax and other unearned income taxes) and income brackets need to be shifted to account for inflation. Payments shouldn't begin until around the $30k/yr threshold, the average career job at $60-80k should pay about 25% tax, and the top income tax should be near 50% above about $125k. The social security tax cap at $132,900 should be eliminated. This is my mathematical optimum, you might have your own, but a fact of life today is that current tax policy is anything but fair or ideal. It's been coopted by lobbyists and special interests and only works for millionaires. UBI creates wealth because currently we have no "human potential" gross national product (GNP) metric. The majority of jobs today are a waste of human resources. For example, is a human life worth more than its potential to flip burgers? The answer is self-evidently yes, so that means that the fast food industry subsidizes its profits by under-employing its workers and depending on government handouts in the form of food stamps and welfare. We can repeat that analysis for pretty much every industry and see that underemployment is one of the great problems of our time. Even if we use the conservative measure of part time workers who want full time work, it tends to hover between 12 and 18% in the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/205240/us-underemployment-rate/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/205240/us-underemploymen... But I'd argue that it's really much higher than than. Is anyone really more than 6 hours productive in an 8 hour workday? That puts underemployment at more like 25%. If we count all the people with degrees working at non-career jobs, or hackers/makers/inventors valued only for their ability to make money for their employers, then I think it's around 50%. UBI gives workers a lifeline out of underemployment. Then they can start their own businesses, which leads to more employment and productivity. If our GNP is $20 trillion, then I would expect UBI to gradually raise that to perhaps $40 trillion (in today's dollars) and beyond over a decade or two if underemployment is 50%. I tried to keep this brief but truthfully I could go on indefinitely. My personal underemployment hovers near 100% because I've never gotten ahead of the curve enough to make any of the inventions I'd like to. I spent many years of my life thinking about how to automate the jobs like painting houses and moving furniture I held that paid above minimum wage but had no upward mobility.

thatswrong0 7y ago

> I think it's time to question the rationality of people who are against UBI This sounds like a thinly veiled ad hominem against skeptics.

zackmorris 7y ago
Ya thanks for pointing that out. I probably should have phrased it "I think it's time to question the rationale of arguments against UBI" because personally I think most of them are straw men masking cognitive dissonant or undignified positions. In other words - at their root are things like classism/racism, fear of socialistic solutions to fundamental problems with capitalism, or flat out greed and the "I've got mine" mentality that's so prevalent in the US. That fear/uncertainty is a distraction from what we are capable of today with automation. It's a 20th century zero sum worldview where giving to someone requires taking from someone else. I don't subscribe to that, because we could largely automate basic sustenance production (food, water, energy, shelter, transportation, etc), charge very little for it, require substantially less human labor, and turn any profits from that into a stipend that we all get for being US citizens. I think that's more in line with a 21st century or Star Trek future.
- akvadrako 7y ago
  I would weaken the claim a little – UBI is at least interesting enough that we should be doing trials. What the skeptics need to show is that trials are not worth it.

folkhack 7y ago

> I think it's time to question the rationality of people who are against UBI. It's people who are invested into the system. Anecdotal: the arguments I get into on this one are with people who don't want to argue any of the human side of the policy. It's not even a thought to them - and they won't even meet you on that battlefield. Also, people who fight UBI are always people who have some sort of investments, are rent collectors, etc. The first thing they will ALWAYS point to is that there's no proof it will help the economy/markets. They also like to point out how it's not fair for someone to take my money through taxes because "I earned" being a high earner (aside: I did get to being a high earner because of hard work, but also because an incredible network of external support via school + family + _community_ + _country_). The fear of UBI is the fear of admitting that you had help. It's admitting the status-quo needs challenged. Like - by ALL MEANS tax the hell out of me if it means that we lessen human suffering and raise the bar for my fellow citizens. Selfishly, I think I'll be better off that way. The point that someone gets the majority of the hotels in Monopoly the game is no longer fun, and it's a race to the bottom... but at this point I think they're just playing a different game than we are.

ap3 7y ago

>If half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished quality of life that takes everything they got just to survive, then wealth is an inherited trait just like cultural identity. I question whether half the country has no upward mobility and an impoverished way of life. Furthermore wealth is inherited, and we have an inheritance tax for it. Still don’t get how UBI creates wealth

zackmorris 7y ago
It's not a question. We passed the point where children have less than a 50% chance of being wealthier than their parents sometime around 1980: https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s-does-poorly-on-yet-another-metric-of-economic-mobility https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s... Countless studies show it's basically impossible to live on minimum wage jobs anywhere in the US now. I'm more than 50% confident that a quick internet search will show them so I won't bother listing them here. The inheritance tax is low and in constant danger of being eliminated by the Republican party. All income should be taxed the same way (meaning we should eliminate capital gains tax and other unearned income taxes) and income brackets need to be shifted to account for inflation. Payments shouldn't begin until around the $30k/yr threshold, the average career job at $60-80k should pay about 25% tax, and the top income tax should be near 50% above about $125k. The social security tax cap at $132,900 should be eliminated. This is my mathematical optimum, you might have your own, but a fact of life today is that current tax policy is anything but fair or ideal. It's been coopted by lobbyists and special interests and only works for millionaires. UBI creates wealth because currently we have no "human potential" gross national product (GNP) metric. The majority of jobs today are a waste of human resources. For example, is a human life worth more than its potential to flip burgers? The answer is self-evidently yes, so that means that the fast food industry subsidizes its profits by under-employing its workers and depending on government handouts in the form of food stamps and welfare. We can repeat that analysis for pretty much every industry and see that underemployment is one of the great problems of our time. Even if we use the conservative measure of part time workers who want full time work, it tends to hover between 12 and 18% in the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/205240/us-underemployment-rate/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/205240/us-underemploymen... But I'd argue that it's really much higher than than. Is anyone really more than 6 hours productive in an 8 hour workday? That puts underemployment at more like 25%. If we count all the people with degrees working at non-career jobs, or hackers/makers/inventors valued only for their ability to make money for their employers, then I think it's around 50%. UBI gives workers a lifeline out of underemployment. Then they can start their own businesses, which leads to more employment and productivity. If our GNP is $20 trillion, then I would expect UBI to gradually raise that to perhaps $40 trillion (in today's dollars) and beyond over a decade or two if underemployment is 50%. I tried to keep this brief but truthfully I could go on indefinitely. My personal underemployment hovers near 100% because I've never gotten ahead of the curve enough to make any of the inventions I'd like to. I spent many years of my life thinking about how to automate the jobs like painting houses and moving furniture I held that paid above minimum wage but had no upward mobility.